An autonomous vehicle is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating with little to no human input. In particular, an autonomous vehicle can observe its surrounding environment using a variety of sensors and can attempt to comprehend the environment by performing various processing techniques on data collected by the sensors. Given knowledge of its surrounding environment, the autonomous vehicle can identify an appropriate motion path through such surrounding environment with little to no input from a passenger in the autonomous vehicle.
One advantage provided by an autonomous vehicle is that a passenger is not restricted to any particular passenger location in the vehicle. For example, in an ordinary vehicle, an operator must be positioned at a passenger location that enables the operator to operate the vehicle, such as a driver's seat in an automobile. However, in an autonomous vehicle, a passenger can sit in any passenger location in the passenger compartment, such as a passenger location in a rear seat.
Conventionally, testing for noise levels in a vehicle has been limited to testing for noise levels at a single location, typically at an operator's location, such as a driver's seat. Such conventional testing, however, does not account for variations in noise levels at other passenger locations in the vehicle, such as passenger locations in the rear of the vehicle. Furthermore, conventional noise testing has typically been limited to testing for road, engine, and operational noises, such as tonal sounds from an engine operating or transient sounds from a component rattling. Further, conventional noise testing methods typically do not account for other sources of noise in a vehicle, such as when one or more passengers communicate with each other or when a passenger communicates with a voice-based user interface to provide a command to a system associated with autonomous operation of the autonomous vehicle. Thus, there exists a need for improved systems and methods for noise testing in autonomous vehicles to improve the quality of passenger experiences at all passenger locations in the autonomous vehicle and to enhance operation of autonomous systems in the autonomous vehicle.